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The Elastic DBMS Blog

April 29, 2011

To database or not to database, that is the question

A lot has been written by people about the benefits and disadvantages of relational databases and NoSQL.

A very well thought out and fact based article can be found on Quora with the title, “Why does Quora use MySQL as the data store instead of NoSQLs such as Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB etc?”

There are [...]

MySQL, noSQL, scalability | Permalink | 0 Comments

January 26, 2011

Sharding and hot-spots

A commonly adopted strategy to address the lack of scalability in relational databases is to “shard” the data.

Sharding is a horizontal partitioning strategy where data in fact tables is divided up into non-overlapping subsets, and these subsets are each stored on a different database. At its core, sharding is a natural reaction to the fact that relational database performance degrades as data volumes increase. If your database behaves worse with more data, give it less data. [...]

foursquare, outage, scalability, sharding | Permalink | 0 Comments

December 31, 2010

Some "solutions" to database scalability

Currently available solutions [sic] to database scalability problems can be grouped broadly into four types:

Scale Up Solutions Scale Out Solutions Non-Relational Solutions Accelerators Scale-Up Solutions

Scale-Up solutions are based on simple logic, get bigger hardware. Or, as Arthur Bloch puts it,

“Don’t force it … Get a bigger hammer.”

- Arthur Bloch, the author [...]

scalability, solutions | Permalink | 0 Comments

December 26, 2010

Factors influencing database scalability

In the context of databases we often use terms like scalability, and speak of “scale-up” and “scale-out”. These terms are often misunderstood. In the previous post, we focused on the terms “Scale-Up” and “Scale-Out”, and in this post will talk about scalability. In the next post, we describe some common solutions to scalability problems.

There are a large class of database operations where the performance degrades rapidly as data volumes increase. For example, the worst case time to join two tables degrades exponentially as the size of the tables increases. [...]

scalability, scale-out, scale-up | Permalink | 0 Comments

December 18, 2010

Scalability in databases: Scale-Up vs. Scale-Out

This is the first of three posts that address the issue of Scalability in databases. In this post, we focus on the terms “Scale-Up” and “Scale-Out”, and the next post will discuss scalability itself, and the final post will describe some current solutions to scalability challenges.

In the context of databases we often use terms [...]

scalability, scale-out, scale-up | Permalink | 0 Comments

December 10, 2010

Database Workloads

We continue to accumulate data at an enormous rate. It is generally accepted that the amount of data that is accumulated each year is growing according to Moore’s Law.

The amount of all digital data created last year, if put on DVDs and stacked, would reach all the way to the moon and back.

The [...]

database elasticity, scalability | Permalink | 0 Comments

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